Category: Visual Communication in Graphic Design

Following up the comments and critiques from different lecturers (which were about how there are 2 separate sections on the infographic and distracting/obstructing yellow lines), I made some changes to my infographic – mostly on the styling.

I tried exploring different layout but it doesn’t work as well.Made the box for facts/statistic section and reduced the yellow lines. I also stylised the “identify” to having dashed strokes to match the pointer lines on the infographic. Dashed line also seem appropriate because when you’re identifying something you have to draw the lines through the missing ones.Moved the human figure a bit to the right to accommodate the “can be any gender” info. (It was too close to the edge)

Made the sub-headline(?) more funny and less self-serious so that it is more attractive and memorable.

23/09/2016

Today we had our final critique session at class and several comments bringing back the yellow line with black streak were made, as well as some other comments such as the vectors & pointer lines.

Brought back the lines but with grey streaks & lowered opacity.

Made a hand vector for the human figure so that the left side isn’t so empty. Tidied up the vectors.

I played around with the layout of infographic and how the title is being laid out on the poster. I also switched from portrait to landscape orientation – the space & laying out looks a lot better and more info can be included in the poster.

Week 11:

Progress & Tiled A2 poster

I was suggested to change the color of the title to grey-red instead of black-red, because it grabs too much attention & competes with the black streaks on the yellow lines. I think I’d also change the yellow line to the ones with “CAUTION / DO NOT CROSS” written on it because some do not get the meaning / purpose of it being there.

I changed the title of the infographic to better match the content of it, because the previous title felt too general and doesn’t really reflect anything on the content of the infographic & how it is being presented. I also stylised some of the lines so it looks more interesting. After tiling it on A2, I could see some text sizes are too small. I ended up evening out the sizes of all texts (despite the scale of the vector icons beside them).

Still working on this one.

19/09/2016

Tile-printed them in color. The yellow lines without black streak looks a lot cleaner & neater.

I was told to branch out more ideas and sketches from the 3 different concepts that I have in creating this infographic. Exploration of typefaces and color, as well as different techniques that can be applied to the infographic is also necessary.

3/9/2016

My first concept is the security / caution / yellow lines themed infographic. The idea is that for people to be aware of certain subtle traits that ordinary people have which may suggest that they’re an abuser; so before you let someone into your life, better set up those security lines. The look for this poster will be more like the standard infographics with vectors and 3 color palette. Since the theme is alert and security lines, there will be lots of yellow and black.

Second approach is to represent the built up of abusive behavior and/or impact of abuse (the damage and harm) through color. This concept evolved to the application of the built up onto the form of typeface – the type disintegrates as it gets closer to the figure of the abuser.

This idea also arise because of how different the words “abuse” and “abuser” are, with a mere addition of a “R”. Abuse is hurtful, harmful, damaging and destructive to the person being subjected of it, while an abuser is confident, looks like any other normal people, unemotional, rigid, stiff. I’ll experiment with customising the type by using either markers, watercolor (so it looks more expressive) as well as digital painting on Photoshop.

For this poster I’ll try to use both photograph (realistic) and vector together.

Usage of realistic photograph inspired by this infographic

Third idea is to present the “How Abuser Work” infographic in a blueprint looking poster, to portray the tactical mind of the abusers who plan each and every of their moves towards their victims so that they can gain full and total control of them. The look for this poster will be more futuristic and less expressive than the second concept.

Typeface that I chose for this are futuristic looking, and some of them (like Andromeda, Garden Regular & revolution) have uneven strokes that sort of jut out / leaves empty space on the letter. I will make use of these typefaces to draw lines (from the strokes that jut out / the blank space) to the points that will be discussed on the infographic.

As for the title typeface choice, I choose them with the thought in mind that it should be applicable to the 3 concepts that I have. Most of the typefaces look stiff and rigid, other than the futuristic ones, to portray the unemotional nature and organised mindset of abusers (when they get emotional its mostly fabricated to evoke sympathy or fear).

I like the typeface Beach Savage a lot because at a glance it looks normal and pleasant (quite rounded corners although it is a condensed sans serif), but at a closer inspection there are some sharp lines that go out of the stroke which hints danger and malice – much like the an abuser.

Throughout Week 7 – Week 8 I’ve been doing some more sketches and doing a draft digitalised version on Illustrator. During QC, it was remarked that the poster has obviously too much text going on – Infographics usually only have up to three lines per info.

QC Followup:

I’m thinking of making the poster interactive, so I might make the human figure openable on its caution marks, and it reveals something grotesque or mean inside.

I’ll also try to incorporate more statistics into the infographic, currently searching for reputable resources.

For this infographics assignment, I’ve decided to cover the topic “abuse”. My infographics would be about how abuse works – what’s the cycle in an abusive relationship (with your partner, friend, or family) and the tactics that abusers use to emotionally manipulate their targets.

The reason I’d like to cover this topic is because I can relate to it personally, and I think it’d be helpful to create something that’d inform people on how an abuse is and raise the general awareness on abusive relationship. This infographic will be more inclined to be informative on the characteristics of abuse rather than the cause and effect of it. In a lot of cases, many people do not realise that they’re being abused just because there isn’t actual physical harm being done to them. This is not true at all and people deserve to know and identify factors in their relationship with anybody that might be abusive.

I’m particularly intrigued with how abuser’s mind work; why do they crave the domination and control of their target/victim? What happens if they’re forced not to abuse, do they experience withdrawal like drug users do? Is abusive behavior inherited, or does it have the possibility to be related to the world’s long history of slavery which causes a heriditery trauma? Can abusers change? I’ll be researching more into these so I’d be able to explain the behavior and manipulative tactics better.

So far on my research, many articles describe abusers to be deceptive and don a dual personality. In abusing their victims, theyd isolate the them to create emotional dependency, blame their victims for their temper and degrade them verbally, lower their self esteem and make them believe that no one would ever want them but the abuser. To create this dependency, they’d go so far as to create hostility victim and their friend behind their backs, so that the victim would come home and seek comfort from the abuser. They’d manipulate real events in their re-telling, withholding informations so that it would appear to the victim (and others) and they’re the true victims in the situation. Abusers justify their act of violence towards their target, blaming them and pushing the responsibility onto them with the classic saying of “If you haven’t …., I wouldn’t have done that to you”. Most victims would then feel that it is really their fault, that they deserve the blame or the beating that’s being subjected onto them. This lowers the victims’ self esteem and most of the time, abuse victims do not remember their self identity prior to the abuse. Victims would feel helpless because many wouldn’t believe their story, as abusers often appear to be the good guy outside – their abusive behavior is seperated from their ‘normal’ life. It is also very difficult to break an abusive relationship, as abusers would tend to convince the victims that they’d change, buy them gifts and coddle them and would resume their abuse the next few days. Abusers have high and unrealistic expectations on things and when things don’t happen as they wanted, theyd blame the victim for it. They have double standards, and often react exaggeratedly & differently to same situations depending on their mood. It’s impossible to please an abuser, but their manipulative tactics make the victim yearn to please them (to no avail).

I’ll do more in-depth research on the nature of abusive relationship and more of its characteristics, but so far that’s a brief summary to what I’ve been reading into and would be covering on my infographic poster + animation.

07/08/2016

Mind-mapped summary on abuser’s various tactics in abusing their victims.

“ABUSER” collage, their keywords and typefaces (with explanation on why I chose them)

Moodboard on “Abuse”, based on the feeling and darkness of abuse

3 main ideas/concept that I came up with the poster are:

-Showing the brain (“mind”), creating a sort of mindmapped infographic

-Using the “blueprint” look, because the information is about how abuser works / the tactics they use

Grungy technical blueprint illustration on blue background

(Inspired by these)

-Viewing abuser’s methods from the “alarming/dangerous” POV, visualising it with red alarm signals

This week we were required to study the ahapes of 2 different cranes, deconstructed them and create something new out of it. We were paired for this exercise and we had to combine our ideas and style into the final output which would be an A3 poster.

Sketches and doodles

We spent quite a lot of time thinking of word puns, and correlating crane to crane bird (hence the bird-like shapes).

For the final composition however I decided to scrap all those ideas and create something different. The idea of making accessory came across because of how some parts look like it could be a necklace.
I decided to use details of the crane to create an earring and make a poster out of it.

The tagline really came up after I drew the vector. I was thinking of words that sound similar to Crane that would make sense with what the poster turned out to be (an experimental jewelry poster? Hahaha). “Crank up your style with CRANE.” is the tagline I came up with, since crank it up means to play/tune it up, while CRANE would be the accessories’ brand name. The shape came about pretty spontaneously as well, but it looks like the person is craning his/her head up which sort of solidify the concept. Gia did the color variations and typesetting; together, we decide which would be best to print out.

Color variations done by Gia

Typesetting

Final 3 pick (of the colors) and printout results

UPDATE

We did another 2 posters, and this time it is pure abstraction of deconstructing the shapes of the two crane images that we were provided with.

While doing this I didn’t pay any attention to the aesthetics or composition, I just drew automatically – I’d draw and deconstruct whichever shape that I found interesting at the moment. We keep rotating the page so we’d be drawing on different sides rather than cluttering one dominant area.

Both Gia and I liked the one on top right the most, because of how the shape sort of shrinks down to the bottom of the page. We originally finished the doodle at a landscape orientation (as seen from the colored, A4 paper version), but it looked way better portrait. The feedback we received was that the scale of each objects/shapes in the composition seem to be the same, and in order to create focal point we need to exaggerate more on different sizes. The way the composition shrinks down looks nice, but right now there isn’t a coherent flow to it.

In this week’s class exercise, we were required to make & layout 3 posters of different topics revolving around science and social issues. The 3 topics I chose are health, abuse (domestic violence & abuse) and human rights (gender equality).

For the poster regarding gender equality, I started off wanting to convey the message through emojis, with a “Don’t Judge” tagline. Another idea is to do wordplay on “babysitting”, breaking down the ‘baby’ and ‘sitting’ and represent it literally. The message is that anyone can do babysitting (baby sitting), not just female. These two come across too weak as PSA poster, and the do-not-judge poster would not be well received because of the word do-not (limitation prompts people to do breach it).

Viewing the issue from other light, I’m thinking of how the poster would bring insight on homosexuality to people who see it. The sentence “If only it was as easy as emoji” came to me while I was thinking about it and even though I think it could be a fairly good point, I have yet to come with idea for the visualisation of it.

With domestic abuse, I want to aim the poster to the abusers rather than the victim which has proven itself to be difficult because of how it would be received by them. Through the poster I wanted to send a message to the abusers that the violence they bring should have been returned to themselves (your punch is supposed to be your pain, not others because it isn’t their fault). But of course there would be no point in creating a poster which message would just be tossed aside. Abusers often blame other people for their own feelings, mistake and short-comings and manipulate their victim into believing that things are somehow their fault, that they deserve the beating / verbal abuse (humiliation, degradation) that they’re getting. Having a poster that have all fingers pointed at them would just not be well received by them.

In response to this, I want to think of how to make a poster that will shed light to the abusers that what they do is not going to do good to anyone, not even to themselves (“Their pain will not/cannot make you better”). This would be hard considering the nature of abusers, but it would be interesting to attempt on.

“Smoke-kissed brain” is the phrase I came up with after reading the article which explains how smoking could cause brain bleeding, even to social/passive smokers. I automatically connect the smoke to the blood – a person blowing out red smoke. To tie it to the brain visually, I thought of giving the red smoke a brain texture to it. Out of all the sketches on the 3 topics, I like this one the most and I think it is the most effective in communicating the idea that smoking is harmful, not only to the lungs but also to the brain. Anyhow, everyone would be freaked by the idea of their brain bleeding so it wasn’t very hard to come up with a dawning visualisation of it.

I’ll be revising the 2 latter ideas before drawing the poster out on the A2 papers.

Today’s in class assignment involve us making a collage of moodboard which includes our favorite graphic designers/artists, non-designer icons who inspire us, and 3 of our favorite graphic design art movement / styles.

My favorite designers/artists are Chris Dixon, the man in charge of Vanity Fair’s editorial design (He previously was in charge in New York Magazine) and Olafur Eliasson, whom I found out during my research for a Viscom in AD project last term.

I like Chris Dixon’s direction in layouting – it is classy, well use of white space and he makes advantage of the photographs very well. He places text in relation to the photographs, and the well typesetting makes the spread and magazine cover looks very interesting and pleasant to the eyes. The cover designs and spread layouts are inviting, dynamic and sophisticated-looking.

Eliasson’s creation, often manipulating shadows and reflections with interesting colors never cease to amaze me. His creations are mesmerizing and ground breaking, with well thought concept and equally stunning execution.

The graphic design movements that I like are Art Deco and Modernism – Art Deco because of its sophisticated simplicity, Modernism because of the edge that the perspective, contrast in color and diagonal shapes show in its design. Romanticism isn’t a graphic design movement, but I enjoy the mood and I often do illustration with the mood & feel from romanticism era.

Art Deco is a form of simple geometrical abstraction that thrived in its simplicity, elegance and its marketability to wide range of demographics. Graphic design & illustration to-date often adopts the Art Deco style because of its simplicity that kind of shows off modernity. Not too rare are iconic fictional characters from stories being illustrated in the style of Art Deco, and they come out humorous because of how recognisable they are despite the simple geometrical shapes that is used to illustrate them.

Modernist graphic design is interesting in its way of making use of shapes, simple forms, and often solid 2 colors. Not much illustrations go on in modernist posters, but they look interesting nonetheless with the color contrasts, simple typeface (Helvetica is often used), asymmetrical approach. The layout of modernist design is very interesting as they’re most often angled, rarely facing forward (a trace of layouting from Russian revolution’s ((constructivism?)) propaganda posters).

The two people whom I find inspirational are not-so-surprisingly performers (in their own field).

Itzhak Perlman is violinist from the older days, and I often refer to his older-dated performances when I’m studying a new repertoire. His skill comes from regular practice; he believes in the power of practicing over and over, and takes pride in the fact that he isn’t born a prodigy – that he worked hard and practiced long enough to get to where his skills (techniques in fiddling and performing skills) are. I relate to him because I’m not like those type of musicians who are naturally talented, blessed with musical sensibility and incredible showmanship even without much practice. I, too, believe in the power of progress and that long hours of practicing and improving yourself will pay off and will get you somewhere. I find Perlman inspiring because he solidify my belief, that not all musicians are born great, as a lot of musical child prodigies tend to receive the spotlight of the music industry. Sure, they’re great, but starting from zero to something has its own value and to have the amount of dedication to succeed in what he does, is exactly why I’m inspired by Itzhak Perlman.

Another performer that I’m awed by is a figure skater named Yuzuru Hanyu. Yuzuru started skating since he was young, and he won the Gold Medal for the 2014 Olympics (giving himself the name of 2014 World Champion in figure skating), as well as setting the world record for highest combined total score. He was only 19 (youngest gold medal champion for so many years) when he broke the world record as well as history, him being the only Asian (ever) who won Gold medal for any categories in the Olympics. In many interviews, he stated that with every competition he aims for new goals, new heights to reach, new barriers to break. I find this strength absolutely admirable and incredible, and I notice that a lot of Japanese have this immensely strong dedication in what they do, and that satisfaction never cease to stop them from advancing. He spends hours of practicing and would carry a Pooh doll to competitions, stating that it is his lucky charm (I find this very endearing). In the 2015-16 season, he won 1st place at Grand Prix (first one to win 1st place in three consecutive seasons) but lost the world championship to Javier Fernandez, putting him at the 2nd place this season. His career also started from the very bottom and from all those novice competitions, he climbed his way up to the world stage and made it big. His persistence, endurance and dedication is remarkable and this is why I feel like he is such an inspiring youth figure not only to me, but to a lot of other people. (Yuzuru Hanyu, Wikipedia page)

This week we had a mini field trip to “Sekolah Kami”, a school that caters to the education of children who have to collect trashes for a living. In this field trip we get to see the area that they live in, the humbly adequate facilities of the school and the students themselves.

Photo Series

The younger students (whom we spent most the time of our visit with) are all so lively. They express eagerness to learn in the school, even with the considerably limited facility when compared to schools in cities. Most of the students who attend this school did not know how to read nor write before; those skills are taught to them in the first grade of school. The school is unable to follow government’s curriculum because of their limited ability to read at 1st & 2nd grade, and the amount of homework and things that have to memorise when using government’s curriculum is simply impossible because these students have to “nyari” (look for trashes to be sold) after school.

Other than academic subjects, they’ve also got art and cooking lessons as well. Honestly, if no one told me beforehand about their living conditions, I’d have assumed that they’re normal students in any public schools in the city. As city folks, we are often so busy with our own things and environment that most of the time we don’t ponder upon things that do exist out there. I personally feel this is a refreshing getaway from all the hectic schedules, deadlines to be met and the hustle of the city.

For the video documentation, I’d like to show the environment and normalcy of the school setting before proceeding to the dirtier, rustier parts of the place and finally, the joy and cheerfulness of the children despite of it. I also want to highlight their excitement on modern technology (most of which they’ve heard of, but never actually tried by themselves). Because the video needs to be 30 sec long only, I have to be very selective with the pictures. I’m currently editing the video on Windows Movie Maker (yes).

My idea (call it concept if you will) for the video is “live, love, learn.” because of how lovely the kids are (at welcoming our visit). I muse on how they live with a positive view on life despite the fact that their lives aren’t as ‘fortunate’ as children in the city (but if they’re as happy as they are, isn’t it already a fortune?). Their eagerness to learn new things is also a pleasant wakening – we often forget how privileged we are to be able to have new things to seek out and learn. These these three words popped up in my mind while scrawling out the storyboard for video, over a simple lunch of hamburger on the way back to campus.

I chose to do hand lettering for this one because I felt it would be a lot more expressive. This would be featured at the end of the video documentation.

As for the background music, I chose to use “Hyori Ittai” sung by Yuzu, because of the childlike, peaceful and simultaneously wistful feeling to the song. I’m using the instrumental version, and edited (not just trimming!) it to 30secs.

26/06/2016

Video screenshots

As of today, this is how the video looks like – I’m still working on the transition, and not so sure with the last few pictures that I chose (the transition from scenery to the students seem too abrupt). Will be working on it tomorrow.